Friday, April 28, 2017

Absence Explained

But I also spent a few not-at-all-enjoyable hours getting there and getting home again. And not to 100% blame my GPS, because I doubt there was a good way to go, at rush hour, but if you can't tell that there's a damned Red Sox game, and going anywhere near Fenway is a piss-poor idea, well, Margaret, I thought better of you.

Though I couldn't have done it without GPS, period. I hate city driving.

Still, it was worth the trouble, even if I will think twice (or three times) before making a similar plan again. I did manage to arrive juuuust in time to rush to the ladies room, and then find a seat*, before it started, and although the seats weren't super comfortable for that long (I stood during most of the intermission, to stretch my butt and hips and back), the production itself was great.
*I'm pretty sure it was sold out, which is kind of neat.

I studied Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in high school, senior year, when Miss Thompson taught it to us alongside Hamlet, bless her. I credit her with making Hamlet my favorite of Shakespeare's plays, despite my not being a fan of tragedy generally, and Ros&Guil appealed to my love of words and wordplay like nothing else. The movie is good, too, I've seen it more than once, but I'm not sure I'd seen the play itself before--surely I would remember!

Although this wasn't the same as going to a live theater performance, it did feel closer to that than to a movie, even in a movie theater. And what both surprised and amused me, as someone who goes to very little theater, is how much of the audience didn't seem nearly as familiar as I am with the play. Intellectually, I know that one needn't have it memorized, or even know the story at all, to see it, but hearing the surprise in the laughter was unexpected to me. And the elderly man in the row in front of me who, at intermission, was telling one of his friends that, you know, they do die at the end... I suppose a spoiler alert on Shakespeare would be silly, eh?

2 Comments:

Like you, Hamlet is my favorite of Shakespeare's plays and I also loved the Rosencrantz etc. movie. My current favorite version of Hamlet is the one with David Tennant and Patrick Stewart. I highly recommend seeing it if you haven't already.